The Aotearoa (New Zealand) Health Quality & Safety Commission’s vision is a sustainable, world-class, patient-centered health care and disability system, which will attract and retain an excellent workforce through its commitment to continually improve health quality, and deliver equitable and sustainable care. They engage with the sector by monitoring and improving the quality and safety of health and disability support services; (Shining the light) and helping providers across the health and disability sector to improve the quality and safety of health and disability support services (lending a helping hand).
As a Crown Entity it is the Health Minister’s expectation that the Commission will strengthen improvement capability across the health and disability sector. This has been a strong focus for the Commission with the establishment of quality improvement networks and continued quality improvement learning programs. With 20 DHBs (District Health Boards) across New Zealand involved, the HQSC needed a web platform for running improvement projects that was accessible nationally.
Bay of Plenty (BOP) was the first DHB to introduce Life QI into their improvement training program. BOPDHB presented their experience to the Commission and a governance group was formed to test Life QI across a number of other DHBs. Following positive user feedback the Commission joined a national contract with Life QI in 2016.
The Commission sponsor places on the Ko Awatea Quality Improvement Advisor and Quality Improvement Facilitator Training programs. The Commission provide Life QI licenses to the sponsored trainees. These trainees have this licence assigned to them at the beginning of the course, have it for the 9-month programme and then they are able to continue with the licence within their organization to encourage great QI work locally. The aim is to improve patient outcomes through collaboration with the support of the Commission programs.
The Commission has been using Life QI as their national improvement projects web platform for 3 years now. The majority of training undertaken by the Commission is in the form of webinars due to the geographical location of the majority of people attending the courses. These webinars are recorded and sent out to trainees so that can refer to them at their own pace.
Life QI is a great way of supporting people with quality improvement nationally through an accessible web based platform. The in-built QI methodology supports the trainees journey and when putting the learning into practice. They still have access to their original programme and trainer if they need further assistance.
The ability to share QI projects with others, brings people together and creates a repository of information that can be referred back to. The discussions area enables people on the courses to communicate throughout their training. This area also allows for the trainer to upload documents and share them with the cohort.
Life QI support the Commission with dashboards that detail the number of people on the training programmes, the projects people are running, the organizations involved etc. The program functionality helps to group together projects people are running on each course.